Churchill Bust Tossed From Oval Office Has A New Home

You may recall one of the first things the brand-new 44th president did 1,749 days ago was have the honored bust of Winston Churchill, Britain's legendary war leader, prime minister and author, removed from the Oval Office.

Many people suspect Barack Obama harbors ill-disguised ill feelings toward Great Britain stemming from its long colonial rule of Kenya, homeland of Obama's father.

Besides exiling the Churchill bust, Obama has been involved in notoriously cheesy gift exchanges with Britons, including Queen Elizabeth, who once received an iPod chock-full of Obama's own speeches.

Obama has also been photographed numerous times with his feet on the historic presidential desk, another gift from Britain made from pieces of a British man-o-war.

Such suspicions of a Chicago politician from the South Side are, of course, silly and ridiculous. A man of Obama's effete education, pettiness and arrogance would never stoop to such juvenile behavior, or if you're reading this in Britain or Canada, behaviour.

So, it was with some emotion and perhaps a little political nose-thumbing this past week that Republican House Speaker John Boehner presided over the installation of a new, larger-than-life Churchill bust in a place of honor in the U.S. Capitol. Ex-Sen. John Kerry even attended.

Boehner hailed Churchill as "the best friend the United States ever had."

The son of an American mother, Churchill was a self-assigned student of many things, including Americana. He was an expert on the U.S. Civil War and deeply revered Abraham Lincoln, whose statue resides by the British Parliament.

Churchill, the Conservative Party leader, Boehner recalled, "had his complaints (about America). Like the time he declared our toilet paper to be too thin and our newspapers too fat. But it was this man's curiosity about the land of his mother's birth that formed the makings of a beautiful — and, of course, special — relationship."

Churchill, of course, was famed as a great orator in stirring radio speeches to his war-torn island people, to Missourians after the war when he coined the iconic phrase "Iron Curtain," and to the U.S. Congress less than a month after Pearl Harbor.

"Now we get to bring it all full circle," the speaker added. "For today — with peace, justice and a touch of majesty — Winston Churchill returns to the United States Capitol."

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